An Unsinkable Titanic: Every Ship its own Lifeboat

by John Bernard Walker

How comes it, then, that this noble vessel lies to-day at the bottom of the Atlantic in two thousand fathoms of water?

A review of the progress of those constructive arts which affect the safety of human life seems to show that it needs the spur of great disasters, such as this, to concentrate the attention of the engineer and the architect upon the all-important question of safety. More important than considerations of convenience, economy, speed of construction, or even revenue-earning capacity, are those of the value and sanctity of human life. Too frequently these considerations are the last to receive attention. This is due less to indifference than to inadvertence—a failure to remember that an accident which may be insignificant in its effect on steel and stone, may be fatal to frail flesh and blood. Furthermore, the monumental disasters, and particularly those occurring in this age of great constructive works, are frequently traceable to hidden or unsuspected causes, the existence and potentialities of which are revealed only when the mischief has been done. A faulty method of construction, containing in itself huge possibilities of disaster, may be persisted in for years without revealing its lurking menace. Here and there, now and then, some minor mischance will direct the attention of the few to the peril; but the excitement will be local and passing. It takes a "horror"—a "holocaust" of human life, with all its attendant exploitation in the press and the monthly magazine, to awaken a busy and preoccupied world to the danger and beget those stringent laws and improved constructions which are the earmarks of progress towards an ideal civilisation.

Courtesy of Scientific American.

Note how far the Great Eastern was ahead of her time. She was not exceeded until the advent of the Oceanic in 1899.

Growth of the Transatlantic Steamer from 1840 to 1912

Not many years ago, there was being erected across the St. Lawrence River a huge bridge, with the largest single span in the world, which it was believed would be not only the largest but the strongest and most enduring structure of its kind in existence. It was being built under the supervision of one of the leading bridge engineers of the world; its design was of an approved type, which had long been standard in the Western Hemisphere; and the steelwork was being fabricated in one of the best equipped bridge works in the country. Nevertheless, when one great cantilever was about completed, and before any live load had been placed on it, the structure collapsed under its own weight. One of the principal members—a massive steel column, five feet square and sixty feet long—crumpled up as though it had been a boy's tin whistle, and allowed the whole bridge to fall into the St. Lawrence, carrying eighty men to their death! The disaster was traced to a very insignificant cause—the failure of some small angle-bars, 3½ inches in width, by which the parts of the massive member were held in place. No engineer had suspected that danger lurked in these little angle-bars. Had the accident happened to a bridge of moderate size, the lessons of the failure would have been noted by the engineers and contractors; it would have formed the subject, possibly, of a paper before some engineering society, and the warning would have had results merely local and temporary. But the failure of this monumental structure, with a loss of life so appalling, gave to the disaster a world-wide notoriety. It became the subject of a searching enquiry by a highly expert board; the unsuspected danger which lurked in the existing and generally approved methods of building up massive steel columns was acknowledged; and safer rules of construction were adopted.

It took the Baltimore conflagration to teach us the strong and weak points of our much-vaunted systems of fireproof construction. Only when San Francisco, after repeated warnings, had seen the whole of its business section shaken down and ravaged by fire, did she set about the construction of a city that would be proof against fire and earthquake. It was the spectacle of maimed and dying passengers being slowly burned to death in the wreckage of colliding wooden cars, that led to the abolition of the heating stove and the oil lamp; and it was the risk of fire, coupled with the shocking injuries due to splintering of wooden cars, that brought in the era of the electrically lighted, strong, and incombustible steel car.

The conditions attending the loss of the Titanic were so heartrending, and its appeal has been so world-wide, as to lead us to expect that the tragedy will be preëminently fruitful in those reforms which, as we have shown, usually follow a disaster of this magnitude. Had the ship been less notable and the toll of human life less terrible, the disaster might have failed to awaken that sense of distrust in present methods which is at the root of all thorough-going reform. The measure of the one compensation which can be recovered from this awful loss of life and treasure, will depend upon the care with which its lessons are learned and the fidelity with which they are carried out.